“We’ve come a long way in the last 18 months: from foam core prototypes built in a garage to an incredible community of active and talented developers with more than 75,000 development kits ordered.

“In the process, we’ve defined what consumer virtual reality needs to be and what it’s going to require to deliver it.

“A few months ago, Mark, Chris, and Cory from the Facebook team came down to visit our office, see the latest demos, and discuss how we could work together to bring our vision to millions of people.

“As we talked more, we discovered the two teams shared an even deeper vision of creating a new platform for interaction that allows billions of people to connect in a way never before possible.

“Today, we’re pleased to announce that we’ve joined forces with Facebook to create the best virtual reality platform in the world,” Occulus VR continued.

“At first glance, it might not seem obvious why Oculus VR is partnering with Facebook, a company focused on connecting people, investing in internet access for the world and pushing an open computing platform.

“But when you consider it more carefully, we’re culturally aligned with a focus on innovating and hiring the best and brightest; we believe communication drives new platforms; we want to contribute to a more open, connected world; and we both see virtual reality as the next step.

“Most important, Facebook understands the potential for virtual reality. Mark and his team share our vision for virtual reality’s potential to transform the way we learn, share, play, and communicate. Facebook is a company that believes that anything is possible with the right group of people, and we couldn’t agree more.

“This partnership is one of the most important moments for virtual reality: it gives us the best shot at truly changing the world. It opens doors to new opportunities and partnerships, reduces risk on the manufacturing and work capital side, allows us to publish more made-for-VR content, and lets us focus on what we do best: solving hard engineering challenges and delivering the future of VR.”

“Our mission is to make the world more open and connected. For the past few years, this has mostly meant building mobile apps that help you share with the people you care about.

“We have a lot more to do on mobile, but at this point we feel we’re in a position where we can start focusing on what platforms will come next to enable even more useful, entertaining and personal experiences.

“This is where Oculus comes in. They build virtual reality technology, like the Oculus Rift headset. When you put it on, you enter a completely immersive computer-generated environment, like a game or a movie scene or a place far away. The incredible thing about the technology is that you feel like you’re actually present in another place with other people. People who try it say it’s different from anything they’ve ever experienced in their lives.

“Oculus’s mission is to enable you to experience the impossible. Their technology opens up the possibility of completely new kinds of experiences.

“Immersive gaming will be the first, and Oculus already has big plans here that won’t be changing and we hope to accelerate. The Rift is highly anticipated by the gaming community, and there’s a lot of interest from developers in building for this platform. We’re going to focus on helping Oculus build out their product and develop partnerships to support more games. Oculus will continue operating independently within Facebook to achieve this.

“But this is just the start. After games, we’re going to make Oculus a platform for many other experiences. Imagine enjoying a court side seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face — just by putting on goggles in your home.

“This is really a new communication platform. By feeling truly present, you can share unbounded spaces and experiences with the people in your life. Imagine sharing not just moments with your friends online, but entire experiences and adventures.

“These are just some of the potential uses. By working with developers and partners across the industry, together we can build many more. One day, we believe this kind of immersive, augmented reality will become a part of daily life for billions of people.

“Virtual reality was once the dream of science fiction. But the internet was also once a dream, and so were computers and smartphones. The future is coming and we have a chance to build it together. I can’t wait to start working with the whole team at Oculus to bring this future to the world, and to unlock new worlds for all of us.”

I covered VR back in the late ’80′s ~ mid-’90′s. The stuff like Dactyl Nightmare was SO crude by today’s standards, yet it worked to convince the brain that you realy were on a floating space platform being hunted by Pteradactyls. You completely forgot that you were at a trade show or in a mall. Of course, the next big development for Rift has got to be the incorporation of cameras. Why try to do the job with complex, glitchy optics and lenses as with Glass? Just mount a couple of binaural cams on the Rift. The technology is there to control the tiny cams to either hold a position, zoom on it, maintain multiple windows at different zooms, use the cams to recreate reality, but with much better and constant depth of field than natural human bio-lensing. You keep the real-world imagery available as a background and your smart cams warn you of incoming or anything that you tell them to watch for, and once an object is recognized, then of course you can assign special parameters to that or any other object to flash or brighten or audio-inform you that an exception is happening and to alter your focus on the game, for example, because your girl friend just entered the room and you NEED to notice her. Of course, I would be happy at the prices so far, just to be able to substitute Rift for my laptop screen. Just amazing. I think Zuckerburg has awesomely taken the field on this and will be seen as the new Henry Ford of information. What is surprising is how long it took for us to get here. I predicted that this would be the Next Big Thing about 20 years ago, with my IGlasses and Amigas and Cyberscape (think low-res Kinect). I suspect that the failure to be a LOT more advanced is mostly due to intellectual property battles that have shut out a lot of potential developers or nearly bankrupted them, like the creator of Siri…

I think this Oculus story could be one of the best business success stories (so far) of all time. Going from just an idea, to a taped up prototype, to crowd funding with KS to a viral campaign to get 9,500 backers and raise 2.5 million (pre selling product and not selling 1 share of stock),then selling out 18 months later for 2 Billion dollars. WoW… Wow…. wow.

I still think John Carmack is the coolest guy in that picture… He is the real reason this project was able to happen. All goes back to Wolfenstein and Doom and that original work. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._Carmack

I don’t understand all the knee-jerk negative reactions I’ve been reading about this acquisition. As a longtime cyberpunk science fiction reader, I can’t wait to get my Ono Sendai deck!

If Facebook can help Oculus to reach more people sooner then that’s a good thing. As for the walled garden nonsense, Facebook had always been an open platform, any developer can build on it, including billion dollar companies like Zynga.

The price of the device will come down, FB will get more content producers on board, hardcore gamers will still get what they want, while other folk who don’t care for games will get other apps.

If Facebook falls out of popularity one of these days, it could become the next AOL: forever chugging along, but increasingly irrelevant in the modern age, with a tendency to stifle anything it acquires.

I’m glad Facebook purchased Oculus because it will provide needed financing. And I think it is another sign that virtual reality is an important part of the near future in a much larger context than gaming.

I’m glad their purchase raised public awareness of VR so non-tech/non-gamer people start thinking about the technology.